Assessing the fitness of Epstein-Barr virus following its reactivation.

ABSTRACT: Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) is usually maintained latently on passaging in cell culture, as are most herpesviruses in vivo. Its fitness, or its ability to infect and replicate in naïve cells, cannot be ascertained by serially passaging it in host cells because no identified cell line initially supports a productive infection by it. Yet its fitness is critical to EBV's remarkable success as a human pathogen. We have, therefore, developed multiple approaches to assess EBV's fitness upon being reactivated from its familiar state of latency. We established and tested expression plasmids for 77 viral genes and a set of shRNAs targeting 25 viral genes to measure how increasing and decreasing their levels affected the fitness of the released stocks of virus. Four of their properties were then

SUBMITTER: Chen Y-FA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12282151 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature